Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Latinos have many skin tones. Colorism means they’re treated differently.

    Latinos have many skin tones. Colorism means they’re treated differently.

    The Washington Post
    2022-03-31

    Rachel Hatzipanagos

    Loribel Peguero, 22, a New York hairstylist, said her darker-skinned grandmother lamented that it was a “punishment.” (Christopher Gregory for The Washington Post)

    Growing up, Anyiné Galván-Rodríguez was not the darkest-skinned member of her part-Dominican, part-Puerto Rican family, and not the lightest.

    “In every Dominican family, because you have such a melting pot of Spaniard, African and Taino origins, you always have a rainbow of colors,” she said.

    Even as a child, Galván-Rodríguez noticed that her physical features shaped how she was treated. While some grandchildren were praised for their looser curls, Galván-Rodríguez was chastised for her coarse, curly hair.

    “No one ever directly said, ‘Oh you have bad hair and because you have bad hair, you’re less than the other cousin,’” said Galván-Rodríguez, 40. “But it was said like microaggressions.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Stateside Podcast: “Passing:” The Story of Elsie Roxborough

    Stateside Podcast: “Passing:” The Story of Elsie Roxborough Stateside Michigan Radio 2022-03-24
    University Of Michigan Alumni Association/Bentley Historical Library Writer and reporter Ken Coleman tells the story of Detroiter Elsie Roxborough, who was born into a wealthy, Black family in Detroit. But when she died in 1939, her death certificate listed her as white.
    In 1914, Elsie Roxborough was born into a wealthy, Black family in Detroit. But when she died in 1939, her death certificate listed her as white. Her life was rich, curious and at times, troubled, all while attempting a sort of high-wire-act of living multiple lives, between cities and names and races. Today, we talk about her life, death, and everything in between. Listen to the story (00:19:36) here. Download the story here.

  • We need treatments based on actual and not assumed genetic variation.

    We need treatments based on actual and not assumed genetic variation. That means assessing the patterns of diversity that reflect the distribution of human genetic variation across the globe. To this end, genetic ancestry should be understood as a continuum that it is not categorized in such a way that serves as a surrogate for race (40). Contemporary usage of continental ancestry categories (e.g., European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Oceanic, East Asian, American, and African) serves as an example of how presumed “ancestral” geographies are assumed as equivalent to biological categories and serve as a false proxy for race. Such groupings correspond to Western racial categorizations and assume genetic homogeneity based on geographical separation, but these groupings misrepresent the actual distribution of genetic variants and neglect continuous movement of people and the resulting degree of mixture across global populations.

    Talia Krainc and Agustín Fuentes, “Genetic ancestry in precision medicine is reshaping the race debate,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 119, Number 12, Article e2203033119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2203033119.

  • Did George Washington Have an Enslaved Son?

    Did George Washington Have an Enslaved Son?

    The New Yorker
    2022-03-07

    Jill Abramson, Journalist and Senior Lecturer
    Harvard University

    West Ford founded Gum Springs, a freedmen’s community, near Mount Vernon. Illustration by John P. Dessereau

    West Ford’s descendants want to prove his parentage—and save the freedmen’s village he founded.

    In Fairfax County, Virginia, two landmarks of early American history share an uneasy but inextricable bond. George Washington’s majestic Mount Vernon estate is one of the most popular historic homes in the country, visited by roughly a million people a year. Gum Springs, a small community about three miles north, is one of the oldest surviving freedmen’s villages, most of which were established during Reconstruction. The community was founded in 1833 by West Ford, who lived and worked at Mount Vernon for nearly sixty years, first as an enslaved teen-ager and continuing after he was freed. Following Washington’s death, in 1799, Ford helped manage the estate, and he maintained an unusually warm relationship with the extended Washington family.

    Awareness of West Ford had faded both in Gum Springs and at Mount Vernon, but in recent years his story has been at the center of a bitter controversy between the two sites. His descendants have demanded that Mount Vernon recognize Ford for his contributions to the estate, which was near collapse during the decades after Washington’s death. They also argue—citing oral histories from two branches of the family—that Ford was Washington’s unacknowledged son, a claim that Mount Vernon officials have consistently denied. As that debate continues, Black civic organizations in Gum Springs are engaged in related battles to save their endangered community. They have resisted, with some success, Virginia’s planned expansion of Richmond Highway, which would encroach on the town, and they have embarked on the process of getting Gum Springs named a national historic site…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Punta Music Has Never Been a Honduran ‘Thing,’ It Has Always Been a Black One

    Punta Music Has Never Been a Honduran ‘Thing,’ It Has Always Been a Black One

    Remezcla
    2022-03-24

    Julaiza Alvarez

    Art by Stephany Torres for Remezcla.

    I was 12 years old when I went to my first fedu, a Garifuna word for a traditional gathering or party in Honduras. I was intrigued by how comfortable everyone was: The women dressed in traditional garments danced to the beat of the drum and sang to the sound of hands clapping. It was effortless. I had never seen anything like it. While I had been to family functions and seen my aunts dance, this did not compare. It was mesmerizing, especially with everyone being Black. It was different, and it set me on a journey to discover who I was.

    Growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, I struggled to find a sense of belonging in a community that did not accept me but accepted what my Blackness could give them. I wrestled with constantly being challenged to prove myself, not realizing that we are burdened with defending ourselves from the people we call our neighbors. Through music, Garifunas have told their story. But sadly, Punta is one of the countless Black musical movements that are having its history erased. The scene at my first fedu was unlike the music videos I grew up watching on YouTube where the Garifuna men would beat the drums, and the fair-skinned and dark-haired women would dance in front of them.

    In my introduction to Punta, I saw my Blackness be celebrated. But to the rest of the world, their introduction to Punta showed my Blackness used as an accessory. Something you put on and take off when you are done with it. That’s why it is disheartening to watch the deliberate whitewashing of this sacred genre of music. The genre’s mainstream face is based on the misconception that Punta is the heartbeat of the Honduran people, the entirety of the country. In fact, this genre is rooted in a more specific community: the Garifuna people, the descendants of mixed West African and indigenous people that have historically resided on the Caribbean coast of Central America…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Aline Motta and the personal diving into collective memory

    Aline Motta and the personal diving into collective memory

    ARTE!Brasileiros
    2020-03-18

    Marcos Grinspum Ferraz

    “Pontes sobre Abismos #17”, Aline Motta, Foto: Cortesia da artista

    The multimedia artist, one of the winners of the 7th Marcantonio Vilaça Award, departs from a thorough research on his family history to address major topics such as slavery, African heritage and a patriarchal structure that remains in Brazil today

    The journey of artist Aline Motta looking for her roots and the vestiges of her ancestors is undoubtedly a personal endeavour. The result, however, concerns the collective memory of thousands of Brazilian families built (or destroyed) in the violent process of the country’s formation, based on slavery and patriarchal structure.

    “It took a while for me to acquire some maturity and psychic centering to deal with issues so deep and difficult that concern my own history and family,” she says in an interview with ARTE!Brasileiros. This maturation time included not only some early artwork that dealt with other topics, carried out especially from the beginning of this decade, but also a vast trajectory as a continuist in movies, which commenced in 2001.

    It was from 2016, when she had the project Pontes sobre Abismos (Bridges over Abysses) selected by Itaú Cultural’s Rumos program, that Motta, now 45, began to devote herself full-time to authorial work, with a multimedia production that did not leave aside cinema, but also unfolded in installations, photographs, texts, publications and performances…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • Twigs was born Tahliah Debrett Barnett in 1988, in Cheltenham, to an English/Spanish mother and a Jamaican father.

    Twigs was born Tahliah Debrett Barnett in 1988, in Cheltenham, to an English/Spanish mother and a Jamaican father. She was also raised by a “jazz fanatic” Bajan stepfather. “What’s it like in Leeds?” she asks me with wide eyes. Assuming she’s asking what it’s like to be Black in Leeds, I tell her that, surprisingly, I had a more Black experience up north than I ever did living in London. “I definitely understand what you’re saying,” she says. “As a teenager, I started getting the bus to Gloucester to be around people who were from the same culture as me. I’ve never experienced such an intense West Indian experience as I did in Gloucester.”

    Kadish Morris, “FKA twigs: ‘I don’t have secrets. I’m not ashamed of anything’,” The Guardian, March 26, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/mar/26/fka-twigs-i-dont-have-secrets-im-not-ashamed-of-anything.

  • A brush with… Ellen Gallagher

    A brush with… Ellen Gallagher

    The Week in Art
    2021-06-30

    Ellen Gallagher in her Rotterdam studio Photo: Philippe Vogelenzang Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

    An in-depth conversation on the artist’s big influences, from Keith Haring to Moby Dick

    In this episode of A brush with…, Ben Luke talks to the American artist Ellen Gallagher about her life and work by exploring her greatest cultural influences. Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1965, Gallagher studied at Oberlin College in Ohio, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She now lives in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Much of Gallagher’s parents’ ancestry—in particular her Black father who is from the Cape Verde archipelago off the west coast of Africa—defines the territory of her practice, which relates to the culture and language of the Black diaspora.

    Though primarily working in painting and drawing, Gallagher has also worked in sculpture, film and animation. Her early style appears Minimalist and spare from a distance but, up close, one observes intricate drawings of eyes, lips and wigs, which Gallagher has described as “the disembodied ephemera of minstrelsy”—the racist blackface entertainment common in the US from the C19th onwards. In the early 2000s, she used cut-out advertisements from Black culture magazines and transformed them with plasticine, making sculptural reliefs that were often imprinted with witty or incisive symbols and imagery. Many of her paintings refer to the sea and allude to the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya: a Black Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, supposedly populated with the children of the mothers of enslaved African women who were thrown—or threw themselves—overboard during their forced journey across the Middle Passage…

    Read and/or listen to the interview here.

  • Sucks that this needs repeating: “Black” “White” “Asian” “African” “European” are not biological groupings/categories or proxies thereof. Thus using such labels in genetic analyses is error laden. Great paper showing (yet again) how and why this is the case soon.

     

  • Genetic ancestry in precision medicine is reshaping the race debate

    Genetic ancestry in precision medicine is reshaping the race debate

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
    Volume 119, Number 12, Article e2203033119
    4 pages
    2022-03-16
    DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2203033119

    Talia Krainc
    Department of Anthropology
    Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

    Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
    Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

    When including more diverse populations and ancestries in genetic and clinical studies, we need to avoid conflating race with biological identity. Image credit: Shutterstock/tai11.

    Precision medicine is an emerging field with immense potential for better understanding of diseases and improved treatment outcomes (1). Its focus: patterns of human genetic variation in populations and individuals—and how such patterns influence disease pathology and treatment. The field rejects the “one size fits all” approach to understanding disease, aspiring to develop tailored therapies that optimize treatment efficacy. It’s a promising but fledgling field that faces numerous challenges, both scientific and practical. But one challenge has not been fully appreciated: the lack of genetic diversity in research and clinical studies (2, 3)…

    Read the entire article here.